Periscope Slightly Peaks Out Over Meerkat In The Battle Over Real-time Video

The results of the live-stream heavyweight battle are too close to call, but Twitter's Periscope has come out of the gate swinging.

Let’s recap the real-time video scene quickly. In January Twitter acquired live-streaming app Periscope ( in private beta) for a reported $100 million. Then in late February competitor Meerkat launched and went gangbusters at this year’s SXSW. Meerkat was rough, but quickly built a user base of 500,000 users. Twitter soon limited social graph access to Meerkat, stifling the overall livestream experience of Meerkat. Just last week Twitter officially launched Periscope – their full-featured official live-streaming app.

Whew. So who’s winning? According to a new article by Quartz the results are too close to call, but that Periscope has a slight lead thanks to the hype around their official launch last week.

Periscope saw a massive spike upon launch and then settled down to just a few thousand more Tweets than Meerkat. Quartz documented this in detail with the help of Tweet data from Topsy:

As the official app of Twitter, its fantastic UI/UX and ability to record streams for later viewing, all signs are now pointing toward Periscope coming out on top unless Meerkat can conjure something up quickly.

For brands right now, the service to use would depend on your use-case, but would likely be Periscope due to its current recording ability.

About The Author

Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.